The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian - By Lawrence Block Page 0,60

you keep them, behind the fake electric outlet. You could fix me a place like that to keep things in?”

“First thing next week, if I can just stay out of jail.”

“Because the burglaries lately have been something awful. You put on that good lock for me, but even so.”

“I’ll fix you up with a hidey hole first chance I get, Mrs. Hesch.”

“Not that I got the Hope Diamond upstairs, but why take chances? You’re all right now, Mr. Rhodenbarr?”

“I think so,” I said.

I changed clothes in a coffee shop lavatory, tucked my burglar’s tools into various pockets, and left my dirty clothes in the wastebasket. The British would have called it a dustbin, and who had told me so recently? Turnquist, and Turnquist was dead now, with an icepick in his heart.

I bought a disposable razor in a drugstore, made quick use of it in another coffee shop restroom, and promptly disposed of it. The same drugstore sold me a pair of sunglasses rather like the ones Turnquist had worn when we wheeled him across town. I’d worn them myself on the way back to the store, and they were there now on a shelf in my back room, and it struck me as curious that I’d bought two pairs of drugstore sunglasses in as many days. In the ordinary course of things, years would go by before I bought a pair of sunglasses.

The day was overcast and I wasn’t sure the sunglasses helped; they might hide my eyes, but at the same time they drew a certain amount of attention. I wore them for the time being and rode the subway downtown to Fourteenth Street. Between Fifth and Seventh Avenues there are schlock stores of every description, selling junk at cut-rate prices, their wares spilling out onto the sidewalk. One had a table piled high with clear-lensed eyeglasses. People who wanted to save an optician’s fee could try on pair after pair until they found something that seemed to help.

I tried on pair after pair until I found a heavy horn-rimmed pair that didn’t seem to distort things at all. Nonprescription glasses always look like stage props because of the way the light glints off them, but these glasses would disguise my appearance reasonably well without looking like a disguise. I bought them, and a few doors down the street I tried on hats until I found a dark gray fedora that looked and felt right.

I bought a knish and a Coke from a Sabrett vendor, tried to tell myself I was eating breakfast, made a couple of phone calls, and was at the corner of Third Avenue and Twenty-third Street when a rather battered Chevy pulled up. The way the man steals, you’d think he could afford a flashier automobile.

“I looked right at you an’ didn’t recognize you,” he said as I got into the front seat next to him. “You oughta put on a suit more often. It looks nice. Of course you ruin the whole effect wearin’ runnin’ shoes with it.”

“Lots of people wear running shoes with a suit these days, Ray.”

“Lotsa guys eat peas with a knife but that don’t make it right. The hat an’ the glasses, you look like a tout at Aqueduct. What I oughta do, Bern, I oughta take you in. You’ll be outta trouble and I’ll wind up with a citation.”

“Wouldn’t you rather wind up with a reward?”

“You call it a reward and I call it two in the bush.” He sighed the sigh of the long-suffering. “This is crazy, what you’re askin’.”

“I know.”

“But I played along with you in the past, and I gotta admit it paid off more’n it didn’t.” He looked at the hat, the glasses, the running shoes, and he shook his head. “I wish you looked a little more like a cop,” he said.

“This way I look like a cop wearing a disguise.”

“Well, it’s some disguise,” he said. “It’d fool anybody.”

He left the car in a no-parking zone and we walked up a flight of stairs and down a corridor. Periodically Ray pulled out his shield and showed it to somebody who passed us on through. Then we took an elevator down to the basement.

When you’re a civilian and you show up to identify a body, you wait on the first floor and they bring up the late lamented on an elevator. When you’re a cop they save time and let you go down to the basement, where they pull out a drawer and give